


Burning the Monkey's Paw

by x_los



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Bad Parent Gabriel Agreste, Character Death, F/M, Family, Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth Redemption, Good Parent Gabriel Agreste, Hawkmoth Defeat, Identity Reveal, Peacock Emilie Agreste, Peacock Miraculous, Redemption, Series Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 13:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20083318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: Gabriel Agreste makes his final mistake, and then unmakes it.





	Burning the Monkey's Paw

The worst part about it, Gabriel thought with strange detachment, was that she’d tried to explain this to him—years ago, now. The girl had told him it would be a life for a life. He hadn’t understood her. He supposed he hadn’t wanted to. 

Chat Noir is bent over her now, and his back shakes with wracking sobs. Gabriel is so absorbed by the spectacle of the grief he’s caused and the odd familiarity of the sound that he only knows Emilie has woken up from her half-decade of sleep when he hears her voice. 

A second later, he registers what she’s said. Adrien. It’s only natural that she’d look for their son immediately. But even as he thinks this, Gabriel understands that’s not the reason she said his name. Mothers can identify their own in a thousand. They can detect whether their children are hurt or merely hungry, just from the frequency of their particular cries. Emilie remembers Adrien’s shrill, infant voice, screaming for her backstage in Milan and Tokyo and his nursery, starving and tired and afraid to be alone (even as an infant, there’d been nothing Adrien was more afraid of). Even blurred and stupid from sleep, Emilie is cleverer than Gabriel. She always was. Even with five years of growth filling out the boy’s frame, Emilie knows her own son. The shape of his back, the sound of him crying. It’s Gabriel who missed the slow slide of time, and what was right before his eyes. 

The boy turning his head towards her, tears seeping out from under his eye mask, is suddenly so obviously  _ Adrien _ that his whispering ‘maman?’ in that tone of baffled hurt strikes Gabriel as so excessive it’s funny, in its own awful way. 

It could have just as easily been him, Gabriel realises with a stab of feeling that threatens to make everything real and palpable again. In bringing Emilie back, he could have  _ killed _ Adrien. And he  _ has _ killed the girl—a life for a life. 

Gabriel recognises the stark abandonment in Adrien’s eyes. After all, their house has plenty of mirrors. Adrien only  _ looks _ like Emilie—so much so that Gabriel has found looking at him almost intolerable for years. It’s his father he takes after, in most other respects. Gabriel knows that Adrien isn’t ever going to forgive him for what he’s done. Worse still, he’s never going to get better.

Even as Emilie awakes, Ladybug—

Gabriel winces. The girl is dead, now. Somehow it’s absolutely obvious. He can’t precisely pinpoint what changed: an instant ago he’d been looking at a child, and now he is looking at a body. Adrien’s head whips back to her when it happens, like he feels her go. Given their interconnected powers and years of reliance on one another, perhaps he actually does. Gabriel has been thinking of the Miraculous-wielders as obstacles rather than children for quite some time. Crumpled on the ground a few feet away from him, the girl looks so small. 

When her suit ripples away without a living host to sustain it, Adrien’s hand smooths the girl’s hair away from her face. There’s no shock in the movement, and no hitch in his loud, ragged breathing (though Gabriel has been observing them well enough to be almost certain that Chat Noir and Ladybug have never revealed their identities to one another before now). There, lying with her limbs at impossible angles, is Adrien’s little schoolfriend, who Gabriel had been a fool to believe had stollen the sacred text by accident. Who’d always looked at his son with poorly-disguised adoration. Who was, or had been, been genuinely gifted in a way that was rare, and special. Marinette, he remembers. That had been her name. He’s not spoken to Adrien often in the past years, but on almost every occasion he has, he’s heard it. He supposes that in another life she would have been the talented, obstinate daughter-in-law he’d have passed the family firm to. The mother of Adrien’s children. The broken set of Adrien’s shoulders (like a dog beaten almost to death at his hand, or a carthorse he’’s worked to the point of collapse) make it obvious that Adrien’s chance of that sort of future has probably just ended.

Seconds pass like hours, and so Gabriel has time to think: more time than he wants. He’s always been thoughtful. Shy, considering, and distant. Awkward. Cold. Adrien’s reserve and calculation are Gabriel’s, but his grace and manner are all Emilie’s. It was Emilie who’d been bright and vibrant, who’d decided to befriend Gabriel when they met at one of Bourgeois’s shows. Emilie who’d brought him out of his cramped, awful little garret studio. It had taken him months of invitations and visits and dates she pressed on him for Gabriel to believe the flirty, aristocratic model wanted anything substantive to do with him. Gabriel has never been as suited to living in the world as she had been. Adrien had always had a favourite parent; that was fair enough. She’d been Gabriel’s favourite person, too. 

Peacocks exist to be admired, to inspire and delight those who see them. Emilie’s power had been to shine, and to help others to do so on their own terms. Gabriel own empathy has made him potently aware of the contours of humanity’s negative emotions, without particularly improving his ability to be comfortable in the jostling world of people. He dominates rather than cultivates. He knows he’s lesser, and has never even particularly minded it. He doesn’t imagine Adrien minds the subservient arrangement of his own matched power, either. Gabriel has also known the flat, horrific impossibility of a world without Emilie in it. Above all things, he can’t permit that. Not again.

He truly can’t look at her now, because she was always quick. The moment she understands what’s happened, she’ll look at Gabriel like she’s never looked at him before. Whether or not he deserves that, he can’t bear it. He’ll fix this, like he fixed it last time, and given what he’s about to do he’d like his last memories of Emilie to be of their experiment, before everything went wrong. Of her entirely covered in his shining butterflies, borne up and floating, laughing, before too much power coursed through her Miraculous and shattered it, and her body with it. All his fault, but even knowing what it would lead to can’t break the beauty of her image and the moment in Gabriel’s mind. 

“Adrien,” Gabriel says carefully, able to bear looking at her reflection. His son looks up at him, and the hatred in his eyes is tolerable, because Gabriel knows how to make things right. There’s so much he ought to say, but Gabriel feels wholly inadequate to the task. His mind is overwhelmed by the thousand scattered ideas he has no time to convey—everything from advice to impossible apologies for the last years to instructions on handling his lines (though he assumes Nathalie will be able to tell Marinette that well enough herself). In fact he knows they’re all going to get on without him. He doesn’t know, but he hopes, that one day he’ll see Emilie and Adrien again, in a place beyond apologies, the very nature of which is closure. Cessation is a form of absolution. 

“Adrien,” Gabriel repeats. “I wouldn’t change anything. Not anything.” 

Adrien’s eyes flicker at what must seem like a piece of cruelty. He doesn’t understand. But he will. 

He wouldn’t change the difficult life that has made Adrien loving and kind. He wouldn’t change how hard he’s worked for his career, only to simply and abruptly leave the world. He had a chance to make beautiful things, to repay Emilie for her faith and to provide for Adrien. He wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to die to keep Emilie safe, and all the bitter work it took to bring them to this point. She’s worth all this, and more. No one needs him like he needs other people, and truly, that doesn’t hurt. Gabriel did this, and it’s a life for a life. He made the sword in his hand before the children stole back their Miraculouses from him, too late—he hadn’t needed them any more. The blade was improbably vast, red and black and shining eerie opalescent green, pulsing with cataclysm in the dim light. Touching it to the ruin of Emilie’s Miraculous had begun to heal the jewel and restore her, and in so doing to kill the young woman his son loved. Shoving it clear through his own Miraculous ought to balance the scales.


End file.
